Archive - May 29, 2022

The following profile is drawn largely from a Peace Corps WorldWide article.   by Jeremiah Norris (Colombia 1963-65) • Rob Schmitz, lived and worked in China from 1996 to 1998 as a Peace Corps Volunteer, first as a teacher, and later as a free-lance print and video journalist. He joins other well-published Volunteers who served in China, e.g., Peter Hessler and Michael Meyer, as a living symbos as to why our government needed to sustain Peace Corps’ presence in China as it emerged into a global economic presence from a distant reality. Their combine out-put of award-winning books, literary awards, newspaper articles, radio and TV presentations — all had their creative starting points rooted in their China Peace Corps experiences. In a contemporaneous manner, this provided Americans with a window — and most especially, a much-needed view into rural China. In a significant case, one of Rob’s books was in . . .

  What strikes anyone reading about the creating of the Peace Corps was 1) how creatively it was organized; and 2) how fast it was put into operation. The reason was that the ‘founding fathers’ (and they were only fathers) took chances. Wofford remarks in Of Kennedys & Kings how a management consultant said to him one evening, “You guys had a good day today. You broke fourteen laws.” Then the consultant promised to straighten out the paper work and urged then all on, saying, “Keep it up, we’re making progress.” Wiggins in his interview with me listed 7 reasons why the Peace Corps was so successful in those early days of the Kennedy administration. Bill Josephson and Warren Wiggins kept the idea of a “Peace Corps” simple. At first, the PCVs were only to teach English. As Wiggins told me, “Our cardinal rule in crafting ‘A Towering Task’ was . . .

  Warren Wiggins would tell me in an interview I did with him in January 1997 (published in RPCV Writers & Readers) that the greatest weakness of the original idea of the Peace Corps was that it didn’t have a constituency beyond “the youth of America.” The Peace Corps, Warren said, “was not an outgrowth of development experience. It didn’t have a constituency in the Congress, the press, or other leadership institutions in the U.S. nor did it have a constituency abroad.” This proved to be an immediate and immense problem. Kennedy had created a Peace Corps and no one wanted it! There were 25,000 potential PCVs waiting to go do something for America, but no Third World country asked for them. Getting requests for PCVs was a major problem. “Shriver almost terminated me in those early months,” Warren recalled in his interview. “He would never admit that, and I . . .